catastrophe
by edeabeth
Summary: Jade West is merely a catastrophe. :a character study


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_old soul_

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Her grandmother once told her that she had an old soul.

Sometimes she thinks that her soul is pierced with holes.

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_introduction_

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Jade likes filling in silence with unspoken words. She devours old books with brittle spines and plays soft notes on the piano, trying to cave in the void with such rich muteness. She feels alone amongst the bright and shinning city that's always moving.

Her home is large, filled with empty rooms and dazzling smiles. Loneliness curls up within her bones, making her feel heavy and bitter.

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_thorns_

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Her father wants her to be a doctor.

He wants her to dissolve within heavy textbooks with narrow black print, become a nameless figure dressed in white and scrubs. To immerse herself within a system and never return, but she can't do that. She wants to carve her name into red carpets and movie posters, to become an icon wrapped up in golden stars and red roses.

That's why she forges her father's signature onto the form, and why she strides up onto the stage.

She sings angry words wrapped in thorns, and tries her best to leave her father in her growing shadow. Jade doesn't know how to be anything but proud, and that is what makes her stand up straight and ignore the sting of each cutting remark. 'she is far to edgy' 'she's so imposing' 'she's too angry' are thrown at her again and again, and she makes her image out of each insult.

It's like a rebirth, finding herself amongst the blinding spotlights and gleaming surfaces. Jade knows far too well that she doesn't belong amongst the bright and brilliant, but that doesn't matter.

She will make herself belong.

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_belong_

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Her father screams at her, telling her _nonono_. She will (_must_) become more than just a failure, because he won't have it. He simply will not give into this frivolous pipedream of a teenage girl, and he won't let her just cave into this society.

She's never quite hated anyone the way she hated him. She loathed his hot breathe across her face, how red his skin became as he grew into a steady rage. Jade wanted to lash out and drive him back, driving sharp elbows into his gut and bash her skull against the thickness of his.

Her mother doesn't scream at her, because she doesn't care. She hands her a wad of cash and signs each form with her sharp signature, and tells Jade not to fuck it up.

She doesn't belong in this family and that simple fact had never been clearer.

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_fact_

_._

Jade West is merely a catastrophe.

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_mask_

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Her first week of school leaves her depressed.

Everyone has a voice that is trying to strain over the rest, and she feels like she is tumbling down into the void. Her locker is a blank slate against a blur of motion and colour, making her feel pale and washed out. The girl next to her was raised in a family of famous dancers, and the boy from across the hall is the son of some famous actor she simply won't care about.

Jade hides behind combat boots and creates a mask out of lipstick.

It's hard to lurk within the shadows when everything Hollywood touches turns to gold and glitter. Inside her locker she takes her father's pocket knife and carves into the smooth metal _midas. _

It takes her a week to paint her locker black out of sheer rebellion against the world, and then she begins to arm herself with whatever she can find. Words, scissors and anger.

For a month she drifts along to the skittish beat of the student body, and then something shifts and suddenly she is launched into Beck Oliver's world.

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_burn_

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She hates how he studies her.

It makes her hands turn to fists, and her words turn to razors.

Jade doesn't want to be broken down into bare bones, lost to the pinpointed details. Black coffee with two sugars, her loathing for Shakespeare and how she cannot handle blending into the world. Beck is slowly grasping at her edges, trying to throw himself within her.

The way he watches her makes her body burn, and she wants to laugh as she imagines her pale skin flaking away into ashes.

He wants to steal her heart and crush it, because that is what boys like Beck Oliver do to girls like Jade West.

They leave them burning.

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_cling_

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Jade West hates many things.

She hates crying the most.

Some days she breaks apart, and tears come spilling out. She is being devoured by loneliness, and can simply no longer see past the glaze of stardom and red carpets. She is vanishing amongst the voices and faces, trying to cling to her tarnishing dreams.

She has a wreck of a future meshing together with her past, and it's creating an entirely new tragedy.

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_brief_

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"I'm Beck. You're in my acting class."

"You've told me this three times already."

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"You have the most amazing eyes I have ever seen."

"Say that one more time and I'll rip your eyes out."

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"Will you go out with me?"

"No."

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"Please?"

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"I'm in love with you."

"I'm not."

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"Can I have your number?"

"Stop talking to me."

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"Hi, Jade?"

"How the fuck did you get my number?"

.

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_ink_

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She reads the Bell Jar again and again until all she can think of is desires and strange metaphors that make her wanting to crawl beneath her plastic home and just _rot_. She stops sleeping and starts to exist only upon a loop that leaves her sinking into the yellowing the pages smudged with ink.

Her father hates her books. Loathes the way they look, second hand amongst red bound editions of medical volumes and various theories of law, her books flawed with cracked spines and dog eared pages.

Perhaps he only detests them so much because they are just an extension of her.

Jade West is drowning amongst old stories and thin words. She is clinging to ideas and ancient dreams, and slowly she is beginning to question if she is not made out of paper and ink.

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_immerse_

_._

She met Cat Valentine in the second grade on Valentine's Day.

She's skipping around with a basket of confetti, greeting each and every stranger with a 'Happy Valentine's Day'.

Jade had kicked her hard in the shin, trying to brush the sparkly red confetti out of her hair. Cat started to cry, and Jade was transfixed at what emotion she had caused.

It takes her until the second grade to discover actual emotion beyond her mother's plastic smiles and vague words and her father's lurking presence. That's why Cat and Jade remained friends, because Jade simply wanted to drown within the brightness of Cat.

"_I think he likes you," _Cat giggles between classes, bouncing up on the balls of her feet the way she always does when she feels exuberant._ "He watches you almost like the way my brother looks at his turtle." _

"_Your brother's crazy."_

(he is actually crazy.)

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_open_

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He buys her coffee like he does every morning.

She pitches it in the garbage bin near her locker the way she always does every time.

For some reason he doesn't stop and she's scorching up in his gaze. She wants to fight him and resist him, because she knows she should be better than some stupid girl who just lets herself get hurt.

There's a small part of her though, burrowed deep within her metal bones and closed circuit wiring that _exists_ despite everything she has tried to do to drown it. There is a girl still haunting her heart, and she so badly wants to open up and accept Beck because he is nice enough and handsome enough and maybe he is just _enough_.

That's the reason why she takes the cup in her hand, pries back the tab of the lid so she can take a small sip and revel in the bitterness.

His grin is blinding, and her frown is thin.

_._

_welcome_

_._

Despite the bright red welcome mat, Jade does not feel welcomed.

The Oliver family are charming people. Andrew Oliver plays golf and laughs too loudly, and Kathy Oliver wears pastel dresses with matching shoes and dishes out almost real compliments. Beck is their prized only child, and his achievements fill the mantle.

Golden plastic trophies and snapshots of his life framed-acting camp, drama classes, him in costume for his eighth grade play _which he was of course the star of_.

"Your parents must be so proud of you," Kathy tells her, glossy lips twisting up ever so slightly. "Hollywood Arts is quite the school to get into."

"They really don't care," Jade says bluntly, because she feels just entirely too defensive amongst the lace curtains and clusters of family photographs. Beck looks unsurprised at her hard words, because he has already begun to know her.

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There is no welcome mat at her home.

Jade has never been welcomed since the day she was born, and that has never bothered her until now.

There is no mantle. There are blank photo albums hidden amongst closets, and somewhere in a shoebox just might be a school photo of herself. There was never a mother's day card preserved, never a father's day card created.

Her mother isn't so sickeningly sweet as Kathy Oliver, but rather taunt with hard sarcasm and soft insults that make Jade look nice. Her father is simply a bastard, and Jade and Beck end up hiding in the garden amongst overgrown hedges.

"I miss looking up and seeing stars." Beck tells her suddenly, brushing his shoulder against her own. "So I started making up my own."

She feels closed in, his presence slowly suffocating her in a painfully beautiful war. "That makes no sense."

Except it does make sense in a way that shouldn't.

They start counting the stars that don't exist, and by the time they've reached a thousand, Beck is kissing Jade.

She can taste the diamonds burning in the sky.

_._

_home_

_._

She becomes harder and harder, and somewhere down the lines Beck moves out into a trailer with bulletproof windows. For the longest time Beck and her were dancing around cardboard boxes and shuffling things around, trying to make it become something close enough to be a home.

The problem was that Beck's home was just ten feet away and Jade doesn't really know what home feels like anyways.

They buy gold fish to make the trailer become a little fuller, and she begins naming them after Shakespearian figures. Hamlet becomes Macbeth, and slowly the cycle of fish becomes Hamlet the Second and Macbeth the Bloody.

Beck can't keep a fish alive to save his life, and Jade likes watching them flush away into nothing.

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_fear_

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Jade wakes up pressing her hands to her chest to keep from ripping apart.

There's a void within, growing wider and wider.

She wants to scream, but she's forgotten how.

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_exist_

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She lies hip to hip with Beck, his blankets knotted around her knees. He has glow in the dark stars glued to his ceiling and clothing scattered around his floor. This trailer will never be her home, but it is the only place she's ever felt really safe.

"What do you want to do after school?"

"I don't know. Watch the Scissoring?"

"No. I mean, after graduation?"

It is at this point she begins trying to make a roadmap. She could become an actress, or a famous singer. She could become something.

She doesn't know exactly what she wants, but she wants _something_.

"Get arrested or something."

_._

_starve_

_._

Her house has become something like marble. It is icy cold, filled with sharp corners and hollowed out rooms. Jade feels like a stranger amongst expensive vases and antique rugs. The diamond chandelier hangs above her head, and she longs to hear it simply crash down to the floor and _break_.

Jade West wants to shrink down and become nothing.

And so she does.

She stops eating breakfast because it feels sickening to feel full. Soon she's halving her lunches, trying to become less and less so she can float away beyond this world.

Beck gets concerned, and she knows that he is piecing it (_her_) together.

_heavyheavyheavyheavyneedtobelightlightlightlight _runs through her mind again and again, and she can't stop trying.

Her mother packs her bag up one night, and she's leaving the house without looking back, and Jade has never felt more like her mother than now.

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_tori_

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She hates Tori.

That's why she breaks the lock open and drags out her possessions out into the hallway. Binders and paper swirl around the floor, and it looks almost like art-abstract and wrong and strangely _satisfying_. Jade knocks Great Gatsby onto the floor, making it disturbing and beautiful.

Tori cries when she catches sight of her locker broken open. It makes Jade feel relieved to hurt Tori, and Beck frowns for the first time at her.

It doesn't matter, because she is washing away Tori's memory on his lips.

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_hurt_

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Beck doesn't look at her for three days, and it takes him ten days to actually speak to her.

_She's standing at his doorstep in the rain, and he can't tell if she's crying or not-but it's enough. She's been punished enough. _

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dare

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Her name is Jade West, and she wants to be someone.

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_truth_

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Sometimes Beck grabs at wrists just a little too hard, and one day Andre noticed the bruises on her arms. Robby catches a glimpse of how she flinches ever so slightly when Beck tries to take her hand. No one ever comments on it, but the truth still remains.

Jade isn't always a good person, and Beck isn't always a good boyfriend.

_ten_

_._

It's been a long year.

It's been a long year filled with Tori and Beck, and Jade doesn't know where she stands in anything now. Beck is burning away everything she is, and somehow she is glaring down a door, counting down each number. There's an anxiety clawing at her bones, and all she can think about it old souls filled with holes, shadows leaking through.

She can imagine him crossing over to the door, grasping the doorknob and flinging the door wide open.

He doesn't, and she tries hard to actually feel hurt.

Jade West walks away from Tori's home, not looking bad at the broken shards of her life.

She drives home fast, flinging herself around sharp corners and driving through stop signs. Part of her is wishing to die, burning up by herself alone. But she doesn't, and that's just fine.

Jade West can survive with half a heart, with a soul filled with holes and a childhood spent alone with hammers.

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_memory_

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She can't remember what it felt like to be happy.

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_start_

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This will not be her end. Rather, it is a starting point.


End file.
